Towards Fabrication of Atomic Dopant Wires via Monolayer Doping Patterned by Resist-Free Lithography

Fabrication of atomic dopant wires at large scale is challenging. We explored the feasibility to fabricate atomic dopant wires by nano-patterning self-assembled dopant carrying molecular monolayers via a resist-free lithographic approach. The resist-free lithography is to use electron beam exposure to decompose hydrocarbon contaminants in vacuum chamber into amorphous carbon that serves as an etching mask for nanopatterning the phosphorus-bearing monolayers. Dopant wires were fabricated in silicon by patterning diethyl vinylphosphonate monolayers into lines with a width ranging from 1 µm down to 8 nm. The dopants were subsequently driven into silicon to form dopant wires by rapid thermal annealing. Electrical measurements show a linear correlation between wire width and conductance, indicating the success of the monolayer patterning process at nanoscale. The dopant wires can be potentially scaled down to atomic scale if the dopant thermal diffusion can be mitigated.